I been biting to write on this for a bit now… piracy. Music, movie, software, whatever. If you illegally “own” it, it’s piracy. And not agreeing with the law is not an argument to support your position and justify your actions to pirate anything. Not even a TV-episode. This wouldn’t be such a huge problem, except that….
A lot of people in this country (South Africa) complain about crime. No argument there. We live in a particularly violent and crime-riddled country at the moment. Does that mean that “lesser” crimes cannot be considered as crimes since we reserve the word crime for rape, murder, hijacking, theft…? Certainly not for copying a music CD, software program or even documentary. You can hardly call that crime, now can you? Or can you?
Indeed you can. The lawmakers of this (and other countries) deem that illegal. So it’s criminal. You break the law, you’re as lawless as the rest of the bunch. When you start to complain about the lawlessness of the country, and own (heck, even redistribute) illegal media, you border on major double-standards. And if you are actively not campaigning against the lawmakers to actually change the law (doing anything about the situation) you’ve got a long way to go, a big mouth to match.
When the laws change, superb. Copy to your heart’s content. Until then, buy legal.
